Cofounder, Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin and Friederike Ernst. Ethereum Economic Zone
Ethereum’s credible neutrality makes it the only settlement layer everyone can agree on. The EEZ builds on that: specialized zones each optimized for a different purpose: nation-state compliance, security-first infrastructure, low latency, consortium coordination. Individually interesting. Together, transformative. The panel explores what happens when these zones compose. Ethereum stops being a single chain and becomes an economic operating system.
About Vitalik Buterin
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has been speaking at multiple events in 2026 about the future of the Ethereum protocol and its intersection with artificial intelligence. In a panel on the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), Buterin described the concept as an effort to rethink layer-2 solutions in a way that integrates them more deeply with Ethereum, rather than treating them as separate chains. He argued that without strong pressures toward interoperability and censorship resistance at the user layer, the result can be "walled garden monopolies" that use the base layer primarily for virtue signaling. He also identified oracles as a "skeleton in the closet" of Ethereum, noting that their security has not received the same level of rigor as layer-2 scaling solutions. In separate talks, Buterin has emphasized Ethereum's role as a "public billboard" and a "shared computation layer" for high-value guaranteed execution, rather than a platform meant to compete with high-frequency trading or chase maximum speed. He stated that Ethereum needs to pass a "walk away test," meaning it should remain reliable even if no core developers remain. On AI, Buterin argued that while local and open-weight AI models have improved significantly, the mainstream open-source ecosystem does not by default prioritize privacy, security, or censorship resistance. He expressed hope that the Ethereum community can create tools that optimize for these properties, including ZK-based payment channels that make API requests private and unlinkable. Buterin also contrasted crypto's approach to safety with centralized visions that he described as "trust the uncle in the sky," saying crypto aims to create systems that preserve user agency and privacy.
Transcript (19 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:00
Fantastic. Vitalik, thank you for being here today.
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Vitalik Buterin0:02
This is the last talk in an easy themed block. So kind of I'll ask you for your take on...
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Interviewer0:10
So the next talk will be in a hard block.
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Vitalik Buterin0:12
Yeah, actually, so kind of medium first and then hard. So kind of...
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Interviewer0:15
I see. Okay.
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Vitalik Buterin0:16
We're still cutting it on the easy side.
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Interviewer0:18
I see. So we're going to do like a tutorial of Circle STARKs after this.
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Vitalik Buterin0:22
Yeah, absolutely. So guys, I'll leave some time for questions from you in the end. So if you have questions already, think on what you want to ask. We already heard Martin's and Jodi's and Philippe's take on the EASY. So...
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Interviewer0:39
The term Ethereum Economic Zone obviously does a lot of the heavy lifting here. But what makes the EASY in your head? Is it primarily an economic thing, like a single market sense, or is it an economic operating system?
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Vitalik Buterin1:02
Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the core is an effort to rethink what L2s are, in a way that gets more of the benefits and less of the drawbacks of all the approaches we've tried so far, and to make something much more integrated into Ethereum. It's not just a separate EVM chain where it can be difficult to see the connection beyond the branding level. It's deeply integrated in a way that's visible to users and developers, and you actually get benefits from that integration. The benefit of being in an L2 has always been the tight integration with the Ethereum market and user base, and the fact that you don't have to be responsible for a lot of your own infrastructure. With a based rollup, you don't even need your own nodes – your infrastructure load on every level is much lighter. Potentially, if you do it right, you don't even need to convince users to create new accounts. There's also the possibility of synchronous composability between L2s, much better forms of bridging with better developer experience, and ZK proofs securely enforcing those goals. So you get more integration and more power at lower cost. It should be a win-win for everyone.
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Interviewer3:23
Well, that fits in super nicely with what Martin said. He said it extends basically what the present is for Ethereum, and all the zones in the EASY start living in the same now. Jodi said by having differently natured zones, you can actually extend Ethereum rather than just adding more block space. You can have use case-specific chains or chains that are specific in some other way. So if you think five or 10 years in the future, if you sort everything that anchors to Ethereum into a few buckets, what are they?
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Vitalik Buterin4:16
I think the projects we've seen so far that extend Ethereum in an interesting way beyond just EVM with more TPS: one is privacy. Intmax and Aztec are good examples. I even think of things like Tornado Cash and Railgun and Privacy Pools as L2s – L2s of privacy instead of L2s of scalability. With Railgun, you can even do internal transactions. These are great and underrated. The second is very high TPS for specialized use cases, like Lighter. Having a mass-scale prediction market or other DeFi primitive running on an EASY rollup feels ideal. Privacy is a dimension we have to keep improving on, especially as Ethereum L1 improves on privacy natively – privacy-focused L2s will need private programmability. I hope to see more of that and better cryptography. I think interesting underrated directions include having an integrated oracle. The whole oracle space is one of the skeletons in the closet of Ethereum. If you compare the security rigor L2s have brought with stage one and stage two to what happens inside many oracles, it's night and day. There's no point in giving reinforced steel doors to your house if the windows are made of glass that breaks after one hammer hit. Maybe improving oracles is even higher priority than a push to stage two. Integrating an oracle into an L2 is interesting because oracles can't be perfectly economically secure, but you want the security base as big and diverse as possible. Then there are L2s ultra-specializing for enterprise use cases. Instead of starting from Ethereum and making it more scalable, you start from an enterprise thing that's trust-dependent and centralized, and add proofs to give users better guarantees. That could apply to supply chain, finance, medicine, voting. Orin's Interfold work is a great example. So there are many directions to tackle this problem.
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Interviewer8:55
Do you think about chains run by nation states? Nation states are typically extremely hesitant to put infrastructure onto Ethereum. Do you see Ethereum becoming the ultimate settlement layer between nations that don't speak anymore?
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Vitalik Buterin9:20
Yeah, it can happen. There's a historical pattern: government blockchain projects first try to make their own consortium chain, go all the way to satisfy conservative people, then it never gets interesting properties. Four years later, everyone forgets and it spins down. Another four years later, the same country quietly spins up a thing where they dump NFTs on mainnet, and it's actually more useful. So it's use case dependent. You don't want to attach too many philosophical connotations to being on L1 or L2 – it's like attaching connotations to being in a house or an apartment. You want to view it technically: what do you want to be close to? What interoperability, scalability, privacy do you want? Sometimes EASY is a good solution; sometimes dumping an NFT or ERC20 on mainnet and bridging into EASY is a solution. You want to be open to all of those.
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Interviewer11:04
Absolutely. If you look at Ethereum's development, it made a very explicit choice to put censorship resistance above speed, cost, and recourse. Once code is committed, it runs. That choice has real losers because most users just want their payment to clear or their money back if something breaks. Should it be the base layer's job to serve users at all, or should it be more of a neutral ground that other networks build user experiences on?
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Vitalik Buterin12:10
It's a difficult trade-off. There's attraction to saying the base layer does the minimum for trust and security, and everything else happens on top. But if the base layer provides too little, capture happens at higher levels. If you don't care about interoperability, it gets captured by centralized providers, and applications create identities inside their app for lock-in, not benefiting users whose accounts could be part of multiple applications. There's a balance: if you don't ensure interoperability, censorship resistance, and competitive market exist at the user layer, you get walled garden monopolies wrapping around the base layer, using it just to virtue signal. I view EASY as helpful in that regard – it does work to make higher levels of interoperability available not just in theory, but by creating standards so L2s built inside it have interoperability by default.
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Interviewer14:22
Let me ask one last question and then I'll hand it to you guys. If I had a crystal ball and it would allow me the answer to one question, whether a specific kind of network exists in the Ethereum Economic Zone in 2035, what network would you ask about to gauge success?
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Vitalik Buterin14:51
I guess one natural use case is to have at least two high-performance, high-TPS DeFi things, like Lighter style or a prediction market, or something providing privacy, and then actually see the easy deposit, easy withdraw, and cross composability happening between them, seeing the value provided. Another answer would be to see some non-financial L2s, like DAOs integrating into that, using one for governance and another for managing internal assets.
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Interviewer15:52
Good. Thank you. I...